Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
Interpretation
Memory is shaped by our desires and perceptions rather than objective truth.
This quote highlights the subjective nature of memory, suggesting that what we recall is often influenced more by our wishes and interpretations than by actual events. It emphasizes that our memories are not merely records of truth, but rather constructions of what we wish to remember, potentially leading to skewed perceptions of reality.
In practice
In a speech discussing how our past experiences shape our identity.
Fear was the terrible secret of the battlefield and could afflict the brave as well as the timid. Worse it was contagious, and could destroy a unit before a battle even began. Because of that, commanders were first and foremost in the fear suppression business.
If youre a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring.
Being a professional means doing your job on the days you don't want to do it
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
If there is anything that is important to America, it is that you are not a prisoner of the past.
Bart Giamatti did not grow up (as he had dreamed) to play second base for the Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then, in time president of the National Baseball League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized that human beings are fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.
...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.
This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.
Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Well, Hubert Humphrey may have sinned in the eyes of God, as we all do, but according to those definitions of Gandhi's, it was Hubert Humphrey without sin.
Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him Who gave it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.